Migrating to Netlify from GitHub Pages

I recently worked on improving the Lighthouse score of this site. After performing numerous optimisations that I will eventually write about, the score came to 98. The reason for those 2 missing points - Slow initial response time from the server.

GitHub Pages was taking about 900-1200ms to send the response(TTFB). Initially, I wasn't sure if this was due to GitHub Pages itself or Cloudflare so I went around looking for similar complaints. There were multiple blog articles that pointed out that this could be because of using a root domain for the site(this site was earlier being served from https://sivasubramanyam.me). Unfortunately, many of those blogs were too old(2014-2016) and I wasn't exactly convinced that this could be causing such a slow response time.

I have had my eyes on Netlify for a long time and after getting amazed by the TTFBs I saw on some developers' blogs, I decided to try it out and see if I could get any improvements. I wanted to make sure that my site didn't go down during this so I tested out with a subdomain initially.

I set up a subdomain beta.sivasubramanyam.me and started measuring the TTFB. It was around 200-400ms with a few occasional spikes in the order of 800ms. This seeemed exciting! I had never seen response times below 600ms in GH Pages(600ms was very rare) and the other features offered by Netlify were also attractive. I cross-checked on webpagetest.org and verified that this difference was actually real. The TTFB came down from around 0.9s to 0.16s. It was time to move!

Before

After

I set up a CNAME for the subdomain www aliasing it to Netlify. After it was provisioned with SSL, I set up a 301 permanent redirect from the root domain to the www subdomain. This ensured that the existing links kept working. After this, I removed the CNAME file in my GitHub repo and disabled deploying from there.

An added benefit I got out of this was that, I no longer have to commit the build directory to the website repo. I use a non-standard build mechanism to build this site(more on this later) and this meant I had to commit the build folder and use that to deploy to GitHub Pages. With Netlify, this was no longer necessary!

I would really recommend Netlify for hosting static sites like this. The features and the performance provided by them is amazing especially when you consider the fact that they are a free service.